America
Obama won't meet Netanyahu before Israeli elections
US President Barack Obama said that he will not meet the visiting
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March, because the Israeli
leader's US trip would be too close to the elections in his country.
"I'm
declining to meet with him (Netanyahu) simply because our general
policy is (that) we don't meet with any world leader two weeks before
their election," Obama said in an interview to CNN. "I think that's
inappropriate, and that's true with some of our closest allies."
Speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, had invited Netanyahu to address the Congress in March.
Netanyahu
is expected to use that speech to lobby for tough new sanctions against
Iran -- putting him at odds with Obama, who has threatened to veto
additional sanctions as he tried to flesh out a deal to halt Iran's
nuclear programme.
Obama downplayed differences with Israel over
his approach towards Iran, saying he has not heard "a persuasive
rebuttal of my argument that we crafted very effective sanctions against
Iran, specifically to bring them to the negotiation table."
Israeli intelligence has confirmed that Iran has rolled back its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium, according to Obama.
The US president said imposing new sanctions now would give Iran a way out of the talks, an outcome no one wanted.
"For
us, to undermine diplomacy at this critical time for no good reason is a
mistake and what we need to do is to finish this round of negotiations,
put the pressure on Iran to say 'yes' to what the international
community is calling for," he said.
Obama said he was confident that he could successfully lobby the Congress to approve a deal once it's struck.
"I've
said before that we will take no deal over a bad deal," Obama said.
"But, if I can prove that the deal we've put in place assures us,
through indisputable verification mechanisms, that Iran cannot achieve
breakout capacity, if I've got a bunch of scientists and nuclear experts
assuring us that Iran is not on the brink of being a nuclear weapons
power, then that's a public debate we should have."
"And I will
then ask every member of (the) Congress why we would reject that deal
and prefer a potential military option that would be less effective in
constraining Iran's nuclear programme and would have extraordinary
ramifications at a time when we've already got too many conflicts in the
Middle East," he said. "And I'm pretty confident I can win that
argument."